Between Sleep and Wake
by RebelFaerie
Summary: "The room's darkness was already tainted by fear and blood and war and death. Love, at the very least, merited a place. He knew few other things, in a soldier's life, that could drive the shadows away. The dreams were worse in Rome, but the waking was sweeter." Virgilia could see Martius behind Coriolanus. He needed this, and always would. A random tender one-shot because, why not?


**A/N:** I've spent the past ten months working on a historical fiction novel, which means that I've gotten so wrapped up in my construction of Renaissance London that I've had friends and family call me out on speaking like Kit Marlowe in ordinary conversation. So to get myself out of my head, I'm starting to write one-shot Shakespeare fics, because, you know, why not. So although I know that this is woefully overwritten and woefully lacking in the dimensions of plot, let's roll with it, guys. My melodrama is oddly soothing.

Plus, I seriously think Virgilia needs something more to do in the scenes she's in. She's continually overshadowed by her mother-in-law and Menenius (who will never stop talking), but I feel like she's a little more interesting, and certainly more human, in her intimate times. Hence this pointless fic. Would love to hear feedback and suggestions for other ShakesScenes I could play around with in my spare time!

Final note - yes, the title's from _King Lear, _and in a wildly different and unrelated context, but let me have this one. Consider it a promise of Edmund fics to come.

* * *

It was everywhere. Running between his fingers, trailing from his hair into his eyes. He could feel it pooling in his boots, soaking through his shirt, burrowing through the cracks of his armor, tunneling parasitic worms that staked a claim to his insides. He pressed his eyes tightly closed, but it was not the sight that made his stomach turn. Sight could be darkened, sounds drowned out, sensation removed, but he could never escape the smell, the rotting, sickly sweet smell of flesh laid beneath the baking Roman sun until it blackened and putrified. A slaughterhouse across the open field of Corioles, a butchery of men with legs and arms strewn isolated across the grass, ready to be drained of blood and brought to the table. It was a smell he could never describe. It was a smell that those who had known it could never forget.

"General… general…"

His eyes were closed, but he could hear the man's voice from below him, somewhere near his knees. A hand gripped his wrist and slipped away, unable to attain a solid hold. Slick because of the man's blood, or his own, or both? He would not look, could not look, but he knew the face that he would see. He knew the voice. Cominius. He would not forget the commander's voice, nor the wild look in his eyes as blood mixed with mud and dust and sweat across his face, lying in the field and whimpering from a sword blow to the thigh.

"General… Martius… please…"

He could hide no longer. Not when called by name. This was his name. This was his duty. This was his Rome. And he had heard the approaching footsteps from across the dusty, brittle grass before the walls of Corioles, walking with a tread he recognized better than his own. The stalking tread of a panther. The helmet glittered under the blazing summer sun. As Aufidius drew his sword, the scarlet blood of the Roman dead caught the light so that it shimmered like rubies.

"Come, Martius. You must know it by now. I am your death, and you are mine. Draw, Martius. Draw and meet me."

The smell of rotting flesh. The thick, slippery slick of blood as his knuckles curled round the hilt of his sword. The cawing of crows and ravens above. _I am your death, and you are mine._ Either way, the birds would feast when the summer sun descended behind Corioles.

And this was war.

And this was Rome.

"Martius! Martius, wake up, Martius!"

He jolted upright with a shout, panting. The thin cotton sheet fell against his thighs, fluttering with the movement of a shroud cast away from a newly quickened corpse. His chest heaved with jagged breathing, and he found that his hand had already moved to his hip, searching for the hilt to a sword that was not there. Of course it was not there. The room was dark, and the stars outside flickered placidly over the sleeping streets of Rome. It was late, likely past midnight. He was home. He was safe.

Virgilia, in a loose white nightdress that glowed luminous through the muted starlight, slipped one arm around his shoulders and placed the other hand on his chest. Her presence forced his breathing to steady, as if her touch were enough to separate truth from memory. Perhaps it was. She had had practice enough, spending nights with a Roman general who bore over twice as many scars than his son had counted years. It was not as if she had married expecting calm nights and easy dreams. He felt her head rest against his shoulder, and with difficulty he forced his fists to unclench. The ache in his arm was worse now. It should have been healing, though it had been less than thirty-six hours since the blow had been dealt. He knew that with wounds of this depth the pain often worsened before it got better. The growth of new skin, stitching over the bone with the clumsy seams of scars, was nothing to take lightly. But his body was good at it. It too had had practice. Both he and his wife, both seamsters.

"It's all right." He cupped the back of her head with his left hand, the hand that remained free of a sling, and twined the soft golden strands of her hair around his fingers. "It's all right. I'm all right."

"You were dreaming again." She did not need to ask what he had dreamed of. As if it could have been anything else. She had been the one to bind up his arm again, when he had returned through the gates of Rome trailing tattered bandages and dripping blood only half his own. She knew what kind of pain came with those blows. She knew as well as any could, and even that was only a reflection of the truth. "It's gotten worse."

"It's the same as it's ever been." He was lying through his teeth, and he knew that she knew this. He could lie to anyone and maintain his stoic composure without breaking. There were only two people that could tell when he was withholding his thoughts. One was his mother, doubtless enjoying the calm repose of the satisfied. The other held him in the bed they shared, holding his tensed muscles and pounding heart in her arms.

"You know it's worse now." Virgilia pulled backward and looked at him directly. Even through the starlit semi-darkness - the watch outside on the Roman battlement called three o'clock - he had not been prepared to confront her eyes. Dark, searching, endless. Impossible to lie to. She had never seen battle; thank the gods he could protect her from at least that. But she had seen the twitch of a hunted animal as he cried out in his sleep, and she had heard the names of dead generals and dying men pass from his lips when his consciousness slipped away beneath the night. He could not lie to her. She knew.

He sighed. "I didn't think it would be this way. It should only be another battle."

"You're a soldier, Martius," she murmured. She gently removed her hands from his chest, and he lay back again against the bed. The summer air was thick and heavy, and already a thin sheen of sweat stood out over his brow. He did not know if the heat or the dream were to blame. "There is no shame in doing your duty, what you've been commanded to do. There is only honor in that."

"There is honor in the senate. There is honor for Menenius, for Titus, for the rest of the consulate. There is honor for my mother; the gods know she goes out of her way to seek it. Do you think there is honor for me?" Virgilia lay back next to him, but he would not look at her. He kept his eyes turned upwards, on the speckled tan stucco of the ceiling, its pockmarks and ridges taking the place of constellations and clouds. "Is there honor in this?"

"Martius, do not think of this. It's late. Try not to -"

He laughed quietly. It was not a laugh of amusement, but the wordless scorn that could not be expressed in any language he knew, and it sent her instantly silent. "Try not to what? Try not to remember? This" - he gestured at the sling, keeping his arm pinned uselessly to his chest - "and this" - he put one hand to his temple, let it hover there for a moment, then allowed it to fall softly to his side - "these will not let me forget. I am a waking remembrance. Every feeling of pain, every scar, every breath in these poisoned lungs, they breathe of death. Men have dug their tombs into my arms, my chest, my self. My body is a graveyard. And the people would see these graves?"

"Don't take it so strongly. It is custom. Rome will have its customs, as all great men will have their weaknesses. If you will allow them to -"

Again, he would not let her finish. It was as if the midnight apparition of Aufidius' grinning wolf's face forced the words to pour from him all at once, as though if he did not speak quickly the dam would be erected again and the usual marble silence would harden into place. He knew he frightened Virgilia; she likely could not remember the last time she had heard her husband speak so many words at once. Silent. Stoic. Strong. Every inch the soldier. But under the feeble light of the moon, breathing heavily in the still night air, there were more words bursting to emerge from him than he knew how to suppress.

"They don't understand. Would you have me make myself a spectacle to the common view? Would you have me strip naked before the people, show them my bleeding scars, bow my forehead to the dust and say 'I did this for you,' when they could never know how to hold one hand against your chest to stop your guts from spilling onto the earth until the surgeon comes? When they could never know how to tell the taste of your own blood against your teeth from anyone else's, by the savor of it? When they could never know that I am not a sword, I am not a shield to be placed on Rome's battlements to frighten Volsces like a scarecrow?" His hands had clenched again despite himself, and the tension in the muscles of his left forearm sent a stabbing pain up through his shoulder. He gritted his teeth but could not relax his fists. "When they look at me and do not know that I am a man?"

She sighed. The breath was so small he was not certain at first he had heard it. It was the sound the soul of a sparrow would make as it exited its body, the hollow bones giving up their spirit with just that tiny gust of air. It was difficult to refute a truth such as that. Rome would have its customs. It would have its people, and it would have its heroes. There was an unbreachable gulf between the two, a charging river that swept away similarities in the great tide of battle. After a moment, she trailed her hand across his collarbone, feeling the thick ridge of scar tissue beneath the pads of her fingers.

"You are a man, Martius," she murmured. "You are a good man." She pressed her lips against the side of his neck, the tender flesh between his shoulder and his ear. "You are an honest man." Another kiss. He shuddered. "You are a brave, loyal Roman soldier. And you are my husband."

He smiled faintly. At last, he turned his head to look at her. She had not removed her hand from his collarbone. "And you are my wife," he replied, with the faintest trace of irony in the words. "Tell me something."

"What is it?"

"When you were told you were to marry me, were you afraid?"

"Afraid?" Her words sparkled with the challenge. "Should I have been?"

"I could not have been your first choice for a suitor. You were young, and free, and I a rough, ungentle soldier. Better made for combat than courtship. You must have looked on me and cursed your stars for depriving you of love, did you not?"

Virgilia smiled and nuzzled softly against his shoulder. "I was young, Martius. I didn't know what love was, then."

"Then why did you agree to become my wife?" he pressed, gently teasing.

"You want the truth? I was terrified your mother would have me beheaded if I refused."

He laughed, a genuine, ringing laugh this time, and kissed her tenderly. "And now?" His voice was teasing; he already knew the answer to the question, but that did not diminish from the pleasure of asking it.

"Martius," she began, but for a moment she did not know what to say. She looked at him, and he felt her eyes travel across him with a caress that put hands and lips to shame. She saw him there, every scar and contour and thought and breath and heartbeat, as he had not been seen since the last time he passed beneath Rome's walls. There was no need to say anything, not when eyes could say more than words ever could. She had said his name, and that was enough. She twined her arms around his shoulders, and they kissed there beneath the moon. The room's darkness was already tainted by fear and blood and war and death. Love, at the very least, merited a place. He knew few other things, in a soldier's life, that could drive the shadows away. The dreams were worse in Rome, but the waking was sweeter.

The Roman soldiers would not have believed it, had the report of their general's movements been reported to the camp. The hands that wielded death through the sword, the arms and legs that scaled the walls of Corioles with the tiger's swiftness, the voice that shouted challenges and promises of destruction, all now found their meaning in the woman who had bound his wounds with tenderness, and who now buried her fingers in his short dark hair as if she never meant to let him go.

"I am not made of stronger earth than others," he said. "I am a man, with a man's faults, and more than my allotted share. But there is one thing I'm sure of, and it is not on the Volsces' field. It is here." Their lips met again, and again time slowed to a honey-sweet lethargy.

The dreams had passed, for the night. The next day would dawn with the same scorching summer sun, sending the rank and putrid filth of Rome stinking to heaven. The next day would bring with it patricians, customs, politics, scars baking in parched golden heat like war trophies dragged by beasts in iron harnesses. That night, that one brief, starlit night, the dreams were gone. Virgilia's arms never left him, and he never released her, until the sun burst through the clouds and again illuminated the streets of Rome.

Unperturbed by the lateness of the hour, the crows and ravens circled constantly, silently over the Field of Mars outside the city walls. Their jagged feathered silhouettes cut black patches out of moonlight, until they passed away on their path and were lost to the darkness that surrounded them.


End file.
